The first thing for a visitor to remember about Tacoma is that it is not pronounced “Tack-coma” but “Tuh-coma”. That’s a rookie mistake that hopefully I’ll make only once. Then again, a part of my heritage tempts me to say “We’re in Warshington” rather than “Washington”. While vaguely permissible elsewhere, this will definitely not fly in the Pacific Northwest. Tacoma, a port city simmering and seething under Seattle’s shadow, has struggled for years to find its place in the landscape of cities on the Puget Sound. The pessimistic stories about…read more

There is something about sitting on a sailboat with no motor running, nothing but a mild breeze pushing us along at 3 miles per hour, and the only noise is the waves lapping against the side of the boat and an occasional distant freight train or another boat speeding by. You are forced to slow down and move at the pace of the wind and the water. Alternating between the sails and the motor, Scott meandered the boat around this part of Puget Sound, past large and small islands, ferries,…read more

This is the final post in the series “Three Days Around San Francisco”. Before I was in the fourth grade, my parents packed the car with me and my two sisters, and left Southern California for a road trip to San Francisco. Between the usual visits to extended family, we spent a day driving around the City. They say that our most vivid childhood memories are the ones that are emotionally intense, which would explain my clear recollection of us kids sitting the back seat of our station wagon (this…read more

This is the third post in the series “Three Days around San Francisco”. On my many walks around San Francisco when I lived there in the 1990s, I would often stare with envy not at the gorgeous apartments, their luscious interiors, epic views and smart, sharply dressed inhabitants. No, I would stare with envy at the bougainvilleas. They are a beautiful, wild, haughty, untameable plant native from South America and happily growing in Mediterranean climates everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except my backyard. Whether in any of my many Bay Area…read more

This is the second post in the series “Three Days around San Francisco“. We were technically traveling to San Francisco for work, so we rented a car from San Francisco International Airport and drove to our first location in Sausalito. My many years living in and around San Francisco told me that it was not wise to drive through downtown San Francisco on a Friday after afternoon. Hordes of commuters were leaving their office jobs and assaulting several bridges, a subway tunnel under the bay, bus and rail lines and…read more

The bride and groom posed for photos, full of jubilation, surrounded by friends and family, and laughing while the photographer clicked away. They managed one more photo when the boat they were on pushed into choppy water and a huge – huge – wave splashed over the bow of the dinner cruise yacht they were on. The bride and groom, drenched as if they had fallen into a pool, cheered even louder. The rest of the party scrambled to get back inside the boat’s dining room. And Charla grabbed her…read more

This is the final in the series “Four Days in Yellowstone“. After what seemed like an endless drive, we turned off the main two-lane highway onto a dusty road in the middle of nowhere. We nearly missed the sign that said “Schwabacher Landing”, the place where Carl had planned for us to visit all along. We left our car in the dusty parking lot and trudged past an artist painting the mountains, a dad and his kids with fishing poles, and a few other tourists smiling at our eyebrow-raising group:…read more

The olive green record player in our hotel room was our first clue that we were in a different, hipper place. Or was it the wood paneled station wagon outside? Or the the shiny silver Airstream trailer? The Goodland Hotel in Goleta, just north of Santa Barbara, was offering icons of my childhood as the new hip. Any minute now, I thought, they’ll be playing 80’s music. Sure enough, tunes from the 1980’s were thumping outside thanks to the hip DJ entertaining a crowded pool on a hot summer afternoon…read more

It all started with the wine tasting. Downtown Santa Barbara is full of wineries and tasting rooms, which we tried to work through even though it was close to closing time. Most of the tasting rooms were closing by 6pm, but we arrived at 5:30 and weren’t ready to end it yet. Walking up State Street, we saw a sign that beckoned “Wine Tasting” and followed it into a side alley lined with closed shops. Then Charla stopped. “Casa de la Guerra!” she said, pointing to a small door leading…read more

Just a few days away from the longest day of the year and the start of summer, we celebrated the end of school by walking to Long Beach’s epic Second Street, the relentlessly beating heart of Long Beach’s Belmont Shore. A few years ago I lived in the heart of The Shore, just steps away from the Pacific Ocean and even fewer steps away from Starbucks and the newly relocated local bookstore Apostrophe Books. More on that in a minute. But I visited my Starbucks with pride. After many years…read more